I have judged Lady Macbeth
very differently. Take these frightful passages with the context--take
the whole situation, and you will see that it is no such thing. A friend
of mine truly observed, that if Macbeth had been a ruffian without any
qualms of conscience, Lady Macbeth would have been the one to shrink and
tremble; but that which quenched _him_ lent her fire. The absolute
necessity for self-command, the strength of her reason, and her love for
her husband, combine at this critical moment to conquer all fear but the
fear of detection, leaving her the full possession of her faculties.
Recollect that the same woman who speaks with such horrible indifference
of a little water clearing the blood-stain from her hand, sees in
imagination that hand forever reeking, forever polluted: and when reason
is no longer awake and paramount over the violated feelings of nature
and womanhood, we behold her making unconscious efforts to wash out
that "damned spot," and sighing, heart-broken, over that little hand
which all the perfumes of Arabia will never sweeten more.

MEDON.

I hope you have given her a place among the women in whom the tender
affections and moral sentiments predominate.

ALDA.

You laugh; but, jesting apart, perhaps it would have been a more
accurate classification than placing her among the historical
characters.

MEDON.

Apropos to the historical characters, I hope you have refuted that
_insolent_ assumption, (shall I call it?) that Shakspeare tampered
inexcusably with the truth of history. He is the truest of all
historians. His anachronisms always remind me of those in the fine old
Italian pictures; either they are insignificant, or, if properly
considered, are really beauties; for instance, every one knows that
Correggio's St. Jerome presenting his books to the Virgin, involves
half-a-dozen anachronisms,--to say nothing of that heavenly figure of
the Magdalen, in the same picture, kissing the feet of the infant
Saviour. Some have ridiculed, some have excused this strange combination
of inaccuracies but is it less one of the divinest pieces of sentiment
and poetry that ever breathed and glowed from the canvas? You remember
too the famous nativity by some Neapolitan painter, who has placed Mount
Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples in the background? In these and a hundred
other instances, no one seems to feel that the apparent absurdity
involves